Around Glacier Peak (July 27 - Aug. 3), 1: The Southern Half

[hike4beer]

Can't thank you enough for sharing this. Truly inspirational. Of course, it is also fanning my current cabin fever into high gear, but that's needed motivation to start planning for better trips.

[raveneditions]

Thanks a million! Great gift, helping me revisit all my memories of those places.
I have a few tips for others interested in this loop. I'll do the current ones first, then a report of how the trails compared in 1980 when I circumambulated GP.
The High Pass route between Buck Creek Pass and Boulder Pass is great and cuts several miles off the total loop. (You'd have to start and end someplace other than the Chiwawa.) Though some of it is social trail, never a constructed trail, I think it's no rougher than several shwacky stretches elsewhere that you describe.
Little Giant and the Napeequa are very popular during High Buck Season (mid-Sept). I've heard that an outfitter usually sets up a big horse camp on the Napeequa, bringing everything in over Boulder Pass, so they may be responsible for brushing out that trail.
In 1980, I walked clockwise from the Suiattle trailhead. Several trail sections were in better shape than now. The White River trail was already barely maintained, and overgrown, but followable. The Foam Basin way trail was not popular enough yet to be noticed. Kennedy Hot Springs was developed, and popular. Most remarkably, I was able to follow the abandoned Suiattle Trail all the way up to Triad Creek and then the abandoned Triad Creek trail from the Suiattle up to Buck Creek Pass. (Cutting several more miles off from what Robin did.) Crossing the Suiattle was scary, but I searched and found a log that looked like others had used it. These trails had been abandoned for years, but were not badly overgrown. I had an old USGS topo showing the Triad Creek trail. In contrast, I tried to repeat that section in 1996 and gave up at Dusty Creek, where brush was so thick it didn't seem worth the trouble.

[raveneditions]

A caveat about my recommendation of the High Pass route. I've crossed HP many times, but never so early in the season that the snowfield just north of the pass felt like risking my life. If you attempt it when there's still a lot of snow, best to have an ice axe and good self-arrest skills.
My oldest GP Wilderness Area map depicts the High Pass route as Trail 2000C, 2000 being the inchoate PCNST. I suspect they were thinking they could put the PCT through there, but then decided the snowfield was too great a hazard. Maybe they thought that with enough dynamite they could bypass the snowfield on the uphill side. That's kind of plausible.

[RobinB]

Thanks a million! Great gift, helping me revisit all my memories of those places.
I have a few tips for others interested in this loop. I'll do the current ones first, then a report of how the trails compared in 1980 when I circumambulated GP.

Thank you for the lovely set of replies! I really wish I would have seen the area earlier, at least before the early-2000s floods took out Kennedy etc. That area around the Upper Suiattle's still really enticing to me, though I know it'd be a huge amount of bush-whacking now.

As you seem to be something of an expert: have you been in the area around Tenpeak Mountain? This ancient (I think pre-Manning) guide from Mountaineers, Routes and Rocks, describes a high route from near White Pass over Tenpeak and down into the Napeequa, but I've never actually heard of anyone doing it.

[raveneditions]

I have one friend here in Portland who did a version of that route decades ago. Also pretty sure I've read a trip report of doing it in spring, with skis. Try searching on nwhikers.net
That upper Suiattle area ("the Great Fill" on some maps) gave me an overpowering sense of quiet and of being very little traveled or seen. Mile after mile, countless spiderwebs across the trail. Overall, backpacking alone in the NW in the 1970s, I kept track of how many days in row I went without seeing a soul. Maybe 20 or 25 percent of my mileage was off-trail or abandoned trails, but sometimes I went a couple or three days even on major trails.

[RobinB]

I have one friend here in Portland who did a version of that route decades ago. Also pretty sure I've read a trip report of doing it in spring, with skis. Try searching on nwhikers.net

Thanks for the suggestion - for whatever reason I always forget about that site, despite the TRs there generally focusing on precisely the sort of terrain I love.

[markesc]

Wow! I'm speechless!!! One of the best reports on OH!!! Seems like an endless photography opportunity!